Untitled (2013) by Fred Tomaselli.
• The latest book from A Year In The Country is Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968–1995, an exploration of “a shadowland of terrestrial TV hidden in plain sight across the unmediated and unmarketed corners of the internet”.
• New music: After The Rain, Strange Seeds by The Leaf Library; Music For Intersecting Planes by Leila Bordreuil + Kali Malone.
• RIP airbrush artist Philip Castle. Steve Mepstead talked to Castle in 2011 about his work for Stanley Kubrick and others.
Strassman began to see patterns in these encounters and created a typology: aliens; guides and helpers; clowns, jokers and jesters; elves and dwarves; or reptilian or insect-like figures. Variations and outliers notwithstanding, this spectrum remains remarkably consistent with DMT studies today. Strassman also looked into the historical literature and found similar descriptions as far back as Szára, who wrote that one of his subjects reported meeting “dwarfs or something.” Forty years later and a continent away, one of Strassman’s participants put it succinctly: “That was real strange. There were a lot of elves.”
A long read by Joanna Steinhardt on the history and nature of hallucinated spirit guides and “self-transforming machine elves”
• Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Ben Cardew on the pivotal role of Stereolab’s Super-Electric.
• At Colossal: Pejac transforms basic graph paper into detailed, trompe-l’œil tableaux.
• Sixty finalists from the 23rd Annual Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest.
• At BLDGBLOG: The landscape architecture of auroras on demand.
• Mix of the week: Float V mix by DJ Food.
• We Have Always Been Here (1995) by ELpH vs Coil | 5-Methoxy-N,N-Dimethyl- (5-MeO-DMT) (1998) by Time Machines/Coil | Machine Elves (2024) by Polypores